A rendering of the recreated Royal Shakespeare Theatre, in the Park Avenue Armory.

The Royal Shakespeare Company will be in residency at the Park Avenue Armory from July 6 to August 14, with one company of actors performing five of Shakespeare’s plays in repertory. It is part of the wider Lincoln Center Festival, but what’s unique about this residency is that the productions will be staged in a meticulous replica of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in the cavernous Drill Hall.

The construction of the theater is remarkable. The theater – holding 975 seats in three levels of steel, with a thrust stage and boardwalks — was first designed and built in the RSC workshops in the U.K., then shipped over two months to New York, in 40 47-ton containers.

For the past two weeks, the crew (also shipped across the Atlantic and including carpenters, welders, and electricians) has been building the frame, proscenium, technical galleries, overhead motorized props, lighting, sound, the backstage, and seats. The central thrust stage is the hallmark of the theater, as it is with the RSC’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon, with seating for the audience surrounding it on three sides. “Anything that can merge actor and audience, we strive to do,” said Geoff Locker, Technical Director of the RSC, who has helped lead the theater’s construction.

It took 19,000 bolts and 390 tons of steel to build. The dressing rooms and various little offices in the backstage area have been fashioned out of the empty containers. More containers are planted underneath the stage. There are acoustic sails on the rafters to both reflect the sound of the stage and deafen any external noise. Lanterns and globes – props for the plays – hang amid the overhead lights. A suspended gallery will hold a live band and actors in balcony scenes.

The result is an unexpectedly intimate space, with the farthest seat from the stage only 49 feet away. The company of 41 actors and 21 musicians will perform in repertory the following plays of Shakespeare: “As You Like It,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Julius Caesar,” “The Winter’s Tale,” and “King Lear.” Right now, as the theater is in its final stages of construction, each of the five plays is being built – with sets, actors, and music – and taken down each day until “As You Like It” opens on July 6.

On a press preview of the theater this morning, the smell of wood was ripe, and steel frames jutted out from the wooden flooring backstage. The red cushioned seats, also shipped over from the U.K., are still covered in plastic. But what is evident is the way the space will lend itself to the performances.

Michael Boyd, the artistic director of the RSC, loves using a thrust stage. “They’re what I like to call communitarian stages, congregational stages, where the audience is aware of the fact that it’s sharing the experience together,” he said. “I love it because you get to recruit the audience as part of your company. I love it because it requires no bull—- on the part of the actors. It demands an honesty.”